The Duchess of Cornwall, left, is accompanied by actress Beverley Callard outside the Rovers Return pub during her visit to the set of the British TV series Coronation Street, in Manchester, England, Thursday Feb. 4, 2010. Shannon Leonard Churchill left the world with a single regret: not knowing how Coronation Street will end. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Jon Super

A very quirky, very Canadian obituary

Man pens own obit, says only regret was not seeing end of Coronation Street

Shannon Leonard Churchill left the world with a single regret: not knowing how Coronation Street will end.

The 44-year-old East Coast man makes the quirky claim in an obituary he wrote for himself before dying from cancer “peacefully at home” on Jan. 31.

“Stuff has been trying to kill me for years and it was colon cancer that finally got me,” he wrote.

In his mostly light-hearted tribute, Churchill said his life was always about the things he was able to do, rather than what he had accumulated and that he had few regrets other than wanting to know how the long-running British soap opera concludes.

“I had a great life with too few regrets to even be sure they really existed,” he wrote in the note posted Monday. “My only regret is that I will not know how Coronation Street will end.”

Churchill rhymes off his greatest accomplishments in life, saying he married his best friend, was in a cage with a lion — qualifying that this was not his wife — spent years enjoying the freedom of motorcycle riding and visited his ”second home of Ireland.”

Churchill, who was from Newfoundland but lived with his wife Melissa in Cole Harbour, N.S., also offered some guidance to people reading his obituary.

“My advice to you all is to make those bucket lists and to start filling them in. Life is short and it only runs out; I should know, I was only 44,” he wrote.

“So get off your butts and live those lives while you still have them and make sure you really think of what you want to matter on those last days. I bet it won’t be the colour or the model of your car.”

He finishes the touching note by thanking his extended family and suggesting that donations could be made to the Nova Scotia SPCA or the Hope for Wildlife animal sanctuary. He said cremation had taken place and that a celebration of his life would be held at a later date.